13 de maio de 2012

Agile methodology comes from the world of software development. It was intended to cure some major problems in that field: projects taking too long to complete; projects so complex and expensive that mistakes, only discovered at the far end, amounted to disaster: projects that, upon completion, were found to miss the mark in major and minor ways because communication among stakeholders had fallen down: projects that simply failed to fulfill the user’s requirements.

What agile development provided was a way to work in short “sprints,” resulting in “iterations”—versions of all or part of the product—for testing and feedback from “stakeholders,” a group that included the end user or the funder. One manager oversees the process, not the product. A series of sprints might or might not lead to a product that was ready for distribution and/or sale.

At the Unbound: Speculations on the Future of the Book conference held on May 3-4 at MIT there was no handwringing by publishers or booksellers, in this case mostly rare booksellers, over print book sales or discussion of the DoJ lawsuit. Instead the symposium, organized by two postdoctoral fellows in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, Amaranth Borsuk and Gretchen E. Henderson, lingered most on what forms the book might take.

It is important to remember that DRM isn’t Amazon’s only advantage or even their principal advantage. I’m not an Amazon fanboy (have you noticed?) and I read on an iPhone, but I buy most of my ebooks from the Kindle store because they offer the best shopping experience I’ve found.

However that (the shopping experience) isn’t a permanent advantage. The Kindle format and DRM are, as long as publishers feel DRM is essential.

A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for an author to self-publish their own work and distribute it to half a dozen of the leading bookstores.

Today, tens of thousands of people are doing it. How things have changed.

One of the people responsible for this revolution in publishing is Mark Coker, the founder and CEO of Smashwords, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based e-bookseller and distributor for agents, publishers and indie authors (those who self-publish). As of this week, Smashwords is distributing 121,000 e-books by 42,000 authors, agents and small publishers to the Nook, Kobo, Apple, Sony, Diesel and Smashwords e-bookstores as well as through Baker & Taylor, which operates the Blio e-reading app. That’s about as many books as a typical Barnes & Noble location can hold at one time.

This paper aims to offer insights into the usability, acceptance and limitations of e-readers with regard to the specific requirements of scholarly text work. To fit into the academic workflow non-linear reading, bookmarking, commenting, extracting text or the integration of non-textual elements must be supported. A group of social science students were questioned about their experiences with electronic publications for study purposes. This same group executed several text-related tasks with the digitized material presented to them in two different file formats on four different e-readers. Their performances were subsequently evaluated by means of frequency analyses in detail.

Marvel Comics has opened a new on-line comics store on Marvel.com, powered by comiXology. It offers “hundreds of collections” and other titles, and allows access to those titles from anywhere, including via the Marvel Comics iOS and Android devices. It is also cross-compatible with the Marvel Comics on Chrome store, meaning that purchases made through Chrome will show up on Marvel.com.

Most neighborhoods in America have a public library. Now the biggest neighborhood in America, the Internet, wants a library of its own. Last week, Ars attended a conference held by the Digital Public Library of America, a nascent group of intellectuals hoping to put all of America's library holdings online. The DPLA is still in its infancy—there's no official staff, nor is there a finished website where you can access all the books they imagine will be accessible. But if the small handful of volunteers and directors have their way, you'll see all that by April 2013 at the latest.

Hogwarts, the wizarding school at the centre of the Harry Potter books, can now count 3 million virtual pupils among its numbers after fans rushed to sign up to creator JK Rowling's latest venture Pottermore.

After its initial launch date of last October slipped and slipped, Pottermore eventually went live to all on the morning of 14 April. Over the next two weeks, the site's chief executive Charlie Redmayne said it received 22m visits from 7m unique users, and over a billion page impressions, with the average user staying on the site for 25 minutes, and visiting 47 pages.

Open-source textbooks, long considered a promising way to cut costs but still not widely used, could become more readily available and easily vetted as a University of Minnesota project expands.

Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books. (Faculty members elsewhere are welcome to post their own reviews, but they won’t be compensated.) Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500, with all of the money coming from donor funds.

To be fair, there are similarities between the past, present and future of the book. Books have always been one of the purest points of intersection between form and function. The proper form of the time (parchment to paper to pixels) has had limited to no impact on the proper function (reading) throughout its history.

We’ve seen, time and again, that form follows function.

However, right now, a debate is raging about form — and the debate is seriously misguided.

The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library now features over 145,000 books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Best Sellers. With traditional library lending, the library buys a certain number of eBook copies of a particular title. If all of those are checked out, readers have to get on a waiting list. For popular titles like Harry Potter, the wait can sometimes be months. With the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, there are no due dates, books can be borrowed as frequently as once a month, and there are no limits on how many people can simultaneously borrow the same title—so readers never have to wait in line for the book they want.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the May 20, 2012 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending May 5, 2012.